Friday, 15 January 2010

I'm not good with disclosing myself. It's not that I won't tell you all about my intestinal parasites, the oscillations of my uterus, and the three day beetroot diet of '99 (good times), it's just that when it comes to Matters of the Heart I am discretion with a capital D, discretion in the Masonic vault guarded by three-headed sabre-toothed Swiss bankers sense of discretion. I am a veritable clam. I am an encrypted stone buried three kilometres beneath Mt Kilimanjaro in a lead-lined sea-chest. That's right, I am the opening chapter of a Dan Brown novel.

All that's by way of not getting to the point, which point is that I am now exhuming my inner life to announce that through processes mysterious and wonderful, I have contracted an alliance with the dearest boy in the world (I refer to critically-acclaimed globally-renowned internetian of letters, TimT), and we are, as I speak, in the process of merging our empires. Or not quite as I speak, because he is presently at work, and I am about to go out for dumplings with friends, but nowish. I.e., I have been living amongst his books (6000 or so) but not his bookshelves; his soap is now here, but not his shower recess, etc. Life is messy and kind of glorious, a bit like my hair, which I trimmed last week in an ill-conceived attempt to look like a rambutan, and despite which this extraordinary person still seems to love me. Sigh.

Awright, I won't go on. You can safely infer about 70,000% more happiness than the above paragraph indicates.

Monday, 11 January 2010

"I may here speak of some attempts by myself, made hitherto in too desultory a way, to obtain materials for a 'Beauty-Map' of the British Isles. Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three classes, 'good, medium, bad,' I use a needle mounted as a pricker, wherewith to prick holes, unseen, in a piece of paper, torn rudely into a cross With a long leg. I use its upper end for 'good,' the cross-arm for 'medium,' the lower end for 'bad.' The prick-holes keep distinct, and are easily read off at leisure. The object, place, and date are written On the paper. I used this plan for my beauty data, classifying the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent. Of course this was a purely individual estimate, but it was consistent, judging from the conformity of different attempts in the same population. I found London to rank highest for beauty; Aberdeen lowest."

- Francis Galton, Memories of My Life, 1908.

Ah, Francis, Francis, Francis. And there was I thinking that you eugenicists were just nice chaps who'd fallen in with the wrong crowd. I've got a whole quiverful of envenomed projectiles aimed in the general direction of this paragraph, but let's leave the one labeled "Prick-Holes - Freudian Much?" and instead fire off "There Is No Such Thing As Attractiveness".

Where to begin? Well, firstly, there is no such thing as a beautiful thing. But what about alps?, you might well interject. And indeed, when I behold an alp, my heart pronks, my knees tremble within my veganware Lederhosen, and I yearn to gambol with the goatlings between the jagged death-dealing outcrops of granite as I clutch at my heaving bosom on account of the high altitude pulmonary edema. But alp worship - I have it on good authority - is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before circa 1750, put an alp before your average Jo and she'd aim her pricker at the "repellent" end of the page. "Alps?" she'd burl, in her exaggerated Wessex yokel accent. "How you going to grow a nice cabbage on an alp, eh? Answer me that." Which is to say, one man's fish is another man's poisson. Notions of what's beautiful, like notions of what's good to eat (tomatoes, fungus, dogs), what sounds nice (Chinese opera, heavy metal, nightingales), and how best to cut a length of demin (poo-catcher, high-waisted, flares) owe - as the entire world knows, or, erm, "knows" - quite a bit to culture.

This much has been orthodoxy for the last half a century. Beauty is not truth; it's just truthy. And as my year 8 personal development instructress observed, "While the current fashion, ladies, might be for bosoms that look like badgers' snouts, only a hundred years ago it was all in the bustle. So don't you worry if it's your behind that looks like a badger's snout. Posterior whiskers will be on the What's Hot list before you can say 'Claudia Schiffer in a boiler suit'."

So it's wrong to say that luxuriantly dimpled thighs are beautiful. What you should say, if you must, is "I have a penchant for luxuriantly dimpled thighs". But there's something about the word "attractive" that makes that nuance nigh on grammatically impossible. Even if you try to install yourself - the observer with the penchant - as an agent in the operations of attractiveness, i.e., I am attracted, the real agent emerges in the by his moustaches, or by her badgers' snouts, or by the way her boiler suit glimmers in the moonlight. The observer is absolved of his (her) response. Q.* is attractive; Q. attracts; of course I am attracted by Q.. Of course. How could I not be? And so whatever actions my attractedness manifests in, they aren't my responsibility, because I was attracted by Q.

About Me

Alexis, Baron von Harlot, is self-appointed Chronicler Laureate to the principality of Lalor, Victoria, Australia, including the lesser adjoining suburbs of Epping and Thomastown, and wherever she happens to be, really. These annals relay her keenly observed observations on matters floral, faunal, anthropological, protozoic, and thingy, with reference to the backyard, down the road, geopolitics, and the complete works of Jeanette Winterson.